Those in Obama administration seem to be firm believers in the unitary executive theory in its extreme form (I’ve heard that this is one of the primary legal theories held by Kagan and probably a primary contributing factor to her nomination to SCOTUS, by the way). They make GW Bush’s administration look like Thomas Jefferson’s in comparison, just like Obama’s spending makes GW look like Scrooge.

Mentally thumbing through history, there are two administrations that I can think of off the bat that made it regular practice of telling congress, and SCOTUS for that matter, to take a hike. The first is Andrew Jackson, and although the second one really didn’t have to tell congress to shove it, he did a lot of things without it — FDR.

Jackson:
Remember the story of the Trail of Tears? The Cherokees took the govt to court over the Indian Removal Act and the Act was declared unconstitutional. Jackson is said to have made a comment something like it’s the court’s judgement, now lets see it enforce it, and went about forcably relocating the Indians to the west of the Mississippi anyway.

Jackson was also at odds with congress over the Second Bank of the United States and ordered his Treasury Secretary to remove all govt depositis from it so it would collapse. He fired his firstTreasury Secretary because he refused to comply.

FDR:
National Recovery Administration ring a bell? This was one of the New Deal programs that FDR did on his own (much of it anyway) and it eventually set him at odds with SCOTUS. He wasn’t as gutsy about SCOTUS rulings as Jackson, but he tried threats of packing the court and may have succeeded if congress had not drawn the line. When the threats failed, he bribed them with a new building and promised to stay out of their hair if they stayed out of his…. and they did. The Darby Lumber Co. case is just one case, out of a sea of cases, that illustrates the subsequent eviceration of the 4th, 5th and10th amendments — this one is notable because it does it very blatantly and all in one case.

Anyway, it’s one thing to be opposed to something the administration is doing or wants to do, but another thing entirely to prevent it from happening. I can think of a number of things that it needs to stopped from doing, like regulating CO2 without any explicit authority to do so, but until there is legislation on the floor that is specific enough to keep the administration from doing it anyway, it’s all just drama. And then they’ll have to be willing to stick it out to put the administration under the noose when it does it anyway. How many of those 243 are willing to do that? My guess is the 171 R’s and likely no one else.